Five months and reluctantly counting

We are now more than halfway through the GMI program! Both happy and sad feelings come to mind at the thought that we will be graduating in less than 5 months. Happy that we will be ready to take on the world (or at least think it) and feeling prepared for what’s next. Sad that I will no longer be surrounded by all the wonderful people in my program. Regardless, this only pushes me to make each day as productive and meaningful as possible.

The last few weeks of the fall semester were no joke. Final week(s) in masters programs are completely different than during my undergraduate career. Rather than back-to-back study sessions for final exams, I was spending hours finalizing prototypes and perfecting presentations. I was pushing to have a couple prototypes prepared for the animal study for Stent-X on November 30th and produced two final prototypes!

For GMI courses- I gave two very different presentations, but both required countless hours practicing out loud and memorizing some form of a script. In our Healthcare and Innovation Entrepreneurship class, we gave an investor’s pitch. There are various types of pitches, but, essentially, you must ecstatically advocate for your innovative product to receive funding by showing your product’s or solution’s benefits in the eyes of all stakeholders. It was exciting to deliver a presentation that did not just show what you’ve done, but promote what you have come up with and see what it takes to begin the journey as a start-up company.

My team for HIE just before delivering our pitch!

For my implementation project, Stent-X, I had the opportunity to present to classmates, peers in the Bioengineering department, and even professionals from abroad. This presentation was a bit similar to the pitch (without seeking seed funding) in that a story was told of the journey of the project and the future directions I planned to take. I really enjoyed talking about all the work I had done over the past 4 months and especially seeing what points each person in the program had reached in their projects.

If you recall, we had each compiled 100 needs. Well, we then each took our 100 needs and narrowed them down to three needs (yes, it was quite the process) and presented them to each other in GMI as potential design projects for next semester. This allowed us to show others what we found to be our top needs and hear what others had found as well- so we could confidently choose our top 5 as potential design projects we wanted to work on from the pool of 30 (10 students x 3 top needs). What is great about this program is what you seek to gain experience on during this one year is all in your hands. We get to choose what we want to work on and Dr. Richardson organizes it in a way that best fits us and the project.

As for the fun stuff- we had a GMI Secret Santa gift exchange and potluck to celebrate the end of the semester before break!

GMI Secret Santa and Potluck

Coming back from three and half weeks of a well spent winter break, I am ready to see what this spring semester has in store for me!